“Suppose they were?”
Without answering she pulled the Venetian blinds, drew down the shades, and turned on all the lights. “Now!” cried Miss Withers. “Don’t you see, Oscar? Artificial light brings out colors that aren’t there by daylight. A book jacket that looked yellowish-orange by day could look red at night. We will have to look carefully—there! I see one now!”
She pounced upon a thin volume on one of the middle shelves and then stopped, her eyes clouded with disappointment. The reddish-orange jacket bore the title Oriental Moments and a drawing of a well-proportioned Chinese dancing girl without any clothes on, but the book inside turned out to be something else entirely. It was Fitz on Contract—300 Hands Analyzed.
“And if that’s a clue,” remarked the inspector unpleasantly, “then I’m a monkey’s uncle. Unless of course you think that somebody drowned Huntley Cairns because he led from a king or left his partner in a secondary suit.”
Miss Hildegarde Withers stared at the treatise on contract bridge for a few moments, and then she slowly replaced the misleading wrapper and shoved the book back into its place on the shelf.
“Oscar,” she said, “the trouble is that we don’t know enough about the victim, his background, and all that sort of thing.”
“Don’t we? We know that he flunked out of Dartmouth for trying to buy a list of examination questions from a French instructor, that he lost half the money his father left him trying to beat the stock market in 1931 and ’32, that he worked more than a year as account executive for a radio advertising agency and then set up in business for himself—”
“And immediately hit the jackpot! He was either smarter than we think or luckier than he had any business to be. Sudden success such as his must have been achieved at the risk of stepping on somebody else’s toes—business rivals, that sort of thing.”
The inspector didn’t think so. “We had a man go up to Cairns Associates and take a look-see. He reported everything okay—Cairns seems to have been himself and the associates too. According to his office staff, he had the habit of working late about one night a week with a string of models and chorus girls, but that isn’t unusual for a man whose home life is on the frigid side.”
Miss Withers shrugged. “Perhaps I’m wrong,” she admitted. She was very, very meek as she followed the inspector towards the front door, but far back in a corner of her mind an idea was beginning to take shape.
Chapter Eight
DOWN IN THE TOWN OF Shoreham the crowd was pushing out of the funeral home into the sunshine. One or another of the photographers darted out to get a shot of Helen Abbott Cairns, a handkerchief to her face, as her father hurried her towards the car.
The reporters yapped like a kennel of hounds: “May we quote you as saying …” “Is it true that …” “Does this verdict …” But their cries were terminated by the slamming of the limousine door and the roar of its motor.
Beneath the great evergreen which shaded the doorway Jed Nicolet stood idly tapping a cigarette against the back of his hand. Commander Bennington came up beside him. “Well!” said the Navy man.
Nicolet nodded. “Deceased came to his death at the hands of person or persons unknown. Only we know, don’t we, Sam?”
“Stop talking like that, you young fool!”
“Well, don’t we?”
“They’re still holding that soldier,” said the commander huffily. “He certainly had a motive, being crazy in love with Helen. And the opportunity too.”
Nicolet shook his head. “Not Montague. That’s why I mixed into it Saturday night. He isn’t going to take the rap.”
“Bilge!” Bennington stuck his lower lip out far enough so that he could have gazed down upon it. “They have no real case against him, not now, anyway. They’ll have to let him go for lack of evidence; you’re a lawyer and you know that. I don’t see anything to be gained by talking, do you?”
“It depends on where you’re sitting,” Jed Nicolet pointed out. “Not from the standpoint of Mrs. Boad, or the doctor, or you. Or me, for that matter. I was an accessory before the fact; I suppose I might as well be one after. All the same, it’s not too nice to know that one of your friends, one of the people you play bridge and tennis with and meet at the Marine Room for dinner every Saturday, is a murderer.”
“But as long as we don’t know which one—” Bennington suggested. “Besides, Cairns had it coming to him.”
“You’d feel differently,” Nicolet told him, “if Pat Montague were on trial for his life, which he very likely will be. Are you for keeping silent even then?”
Bennington didn’t say anything. Mrs. Boad and Trudy were coming towards them. He looked off, saw his wife, and bowed out. “Ava’s waiting,” he called out over his shoulder. “We’ll talk about it later, won’t we, Jed?”
“Such a fuss!” Mame Boad remarked after a moment. “And all over practically nothing! It’s such a shame that Huntley Cairns has all that money. If he were poor this would have been written off as an accidental death.”
“If he’d been poor he wouldn’t have had a swimming pool to get drowned in,” Jed reminded her.
Mrs. Boad snorted. “I must be running along—Trudy has to get to the hairdresser’s. Do come up for dinner one night this week and we’ll talk about it then. But I still insist that the whole thing is crystal-clear. That Abbott girl’s testimony clinched it. Cairns died an accidental death by getting caught on that metal hook, or whatever it was, down underwater in the pool.”
“In spite of the fact that the man could barely swim on the surface?”
Mame Boad said there was no telling what some people would do, and flounced off. Jed threw away his cigarette and started after them and then was halted by a jovial hail from Dr. Radebaugh. “Drop you anywhere, Jed?”
Nicolet shook his head. “I’m walking back. I want to think. This setup is all wrong.”
“You’re doing too much thinking,” the doctor advised him. “It isn’t good for you—makes for ulcers and things. Better come up to my office and have a checkup.”
He climbed into his roadster, and Jed started off along the sidewalk. There was still plenty wrong with the setup. Wrong because of many things, but chiefly because of Huntley Cairns, who now lay back inside that funeral parlor in an expensive casket with real silver handles, unwept, unhonored, and unsung. Most definitely unwept.
Jed walked slowly back down town, pausing at the Elite Florists to order a suitable floral tribute for the funeral. He wondered if it was in good taste to send a corsage of orchids to the widow. Probably not, he decided, and chose two dozen waxy-white Frau Karl Druschki roses. On second thought he ordered the orchids sent to Lawn.
Up at the salmon-pink house on the hill, Miss Hildegarde Withers was just being aided into the police sedan by the inspector when a taxi pulled up and deposited Lawn Abbott. She stopped short, staring, and then came forward, looking stranger and paler than ever in the navy-blue suit which she had worn as suitable for inquests and funerals. “Just exactly what is going on here?” she demanded bluntly.
“Er—you see—” began Miss Withers.
“I get it!” Lawn said. “Miss Withers, you’re being arrested, aren’t you?” She whirled on the inspector. “What’s it for? I demand to know!”
He stared at her, straight-faced. “Now, if you’re really demanding you may as well know that this lady’s been laying herself open to a charge of breaking and entering. Or illegal entry, anyway.”
“Is that it?” Lawn Abbott drew herself up to her full height, which was slightly over five feet, including her heels. “Then let me tell you something, mister policeman. You can’t hold Miss Withers on any such charge as that. She had every right to be in the house!”
“Just why?” asked the inspector very gravely.
“Because I asked her to! Only yesterday morning I called her into the case because I could see what a botch the regular police were making of it. If she came inside she was only there at my request, trying to straighten out this
muddle! Now, let’s see you arrest her and make it stick!”
The inspector, containing himself with difficulty, bowed. “Under the circumstances I haven’t any choice,” he admitted. “Miss Withers, you have been sprung, and how!” He winked at her behind Lawn’s back.
“I certainly have, haven’t I?” murmured the schoolteacher, a little taken aback at the girl’s intense partisanship.
Lawn grasped her hand. “Please come on back in. I want to talk to you.”
“I think maybe I’ll come too,” suggested Inspector Piper wickedly.
“You’ll come with a search warrant tucked in your hot little hand, and not without it!” Lawn drew Miss Withers towards the front door, pausing to glare at Officer Lunney sprawled in the deck chair.
Once inside, Miss Withers shook her head. “Very kind of you—but, child, aren’t you afraid of making enemies sometimes? You were rather short with the inspector, and in front of one of his subordinates too.”
“Oh, dear. That’s a knack I seem to have,” Lawn admitted ruefully. “For making un-friends. I’m always getting into trouble because I say what I mean and what I think—in a world full of people who live by double talk.” She led the way into the living room and threw herself down on a big divan, relaxing immediately as a cat on a cushion.
“I suppose,” she said, “you think I’m an odd person. Maybe I am. Maybe you’re a bit odd too. I guess I shouldn’t have rushed out of your place yesterday—I had no business to have hurt feelings. But please tell me what’s going on and what’s going to happen. I left the inquest early when I saw the way it was going, but Helen and Father will be along shortly. We haven’t much time.”
“It is later than you think,” the schoolteacher agreed. “They used to inscribe that on sundials, so it must be true.”
“I’m truly sorry that I blew up yesterday,” Lawn repeated. She bit thoughtfully at the tip of her right forefinger. “I guess I’m just the moody type. But I’d just had a scene with Helen and Father. I can’t stand my family, you see, and they can’t stand me. Never mind that—I hear that you are doing your level best to get Pat out of jail, and I want to know all about it, and how I can help. By the way, if it’s a question of money—”
“Dear me, no,” Miss Withers assured her. “Snooping is for me a labor of love, and I don’t want to lose my amateur standing at this late date. As for the progress I’m making, all I can say is that I’ve tripped over a number of threads. I don’t know just where they lead, except that they do not lead towards Pat Montague. If he had had murder in his heart he wouldn’t have come along the highway in broad daylight to crash a party he hadn’t been invited to. He’d have sneaked in after dark, with an Army pistol or a hand grenade or something—”
“You mentioned threads,” Lawn reminded her.
“I did. One thread seems to lead to a group of outstanding local citizens who made a mysterious proposition to me some weeks ago. Another indicates your gardener, who may not be a murderer but who takes it upon himself to water lawns and flowerbeds in the heat of the day, which, according to the best horticultural authorities, is simply not done. A third is tangled up with the personality and background of Cairns himself—how he managed to make a million dollars or so in three years, and just what sort of public relations he was mixed up in. He doesn’t seem the type, somehow—”
“To make money, you mean? But everybody’s been making money the last three years.”
“Every one fortunate enough not to wear a uniform, you mean. However, I was referring to Cairns’s personality. He isn’t like any public-relations man I ever knew. They are usually ex-reporters or disappointed writers. Cairns was in his late thirties, which means that he came to maturity in the between-war era. I would expect any publicity or public-relations man to have some manuscript poetry in the back of his desk, or the first draft of the great American novel. At the very least there should be some worn volumes of James Branch Cabell and Floyd Dell and Ronald Firbank somewhere in his library.”
Lawn nodded. “Huntley was different.” She pointed. “You know, I wouldn’t like to admit it to everybody, but every book in the library in there was bought in bulk from a dealer in town. He got what they call publishers’ remainders. Those are the ones that they can’t sell in the ordinary way. He didn’t care, as long as they filled up the shelves. Neither did Helen; she’s no reader. If there isn’t any dancing or bridge or anything, she just goes to sleep.”
“Very sensible of her, in a way. But to return to my threads—the last one has to do with a book in a red jacket, a book that seems to have mysteriously disappeared from the library and which somebody must have been searching for at the time I dropped in.”
Miss Withers was watching Lawn’s face very closely, but the girl only looked blank at the mention of the book. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Who’d want to take one of the books? I told you they were all remainders, at ten or twenty cents apiece. So there isn’t much chance of a first-folio Shakespeare or a Gutenberg Bible or anything. I mean, there couldn’t be anything of the slightest value.”
“I doubt very much,” observed Miss Hildegarde Withers, “if this murder was committed for money. After all, nobody benefits financially but your sister, and she had everything already.”
“Everything,” Lawn agreed softly “Except Pat Montague.”
“But, child, didn’t you indicate yesterday that your sister had never loved anything except herself?”
The girl smiled wryly. “There’s love—and then there’s wanting somebody because he’s all the things your husband isn’t. Because he’s tall and good looking and dances well and is a sort of war hero and represents the things you’ve lost. As I told you, Helen is emotionally immature.”
“In your opinion, would Helen have run away with Pat Montague if he’d asked her to?”
Lawn thought about that for some time. Then she shook her head. “She’s too conventional. Besides, Pat wouldn’t have asked her to—not after he’d actually seen for himself that she was really and truly married to somebody else. Pat’s a poet, really, but he’s the soul of honor.”
“Too honorable to hold a successful rival under water until he drowned, at any rate?” Miss Withers nodded. “By the way, I almost forgot to ask. Just what was the final autopsy report?”
“What everyone expected. The autopsy surgeon backed up everything that Harry Radebaugh had diagnosed Saturday night, just after it happened. Huntley died from something called ‘syncope,’ which means he strangled all at once, from shock.”
“Did you testify?”
“Just about the snag at the bottom of the pool. I don’t know how much stock they put in what I said. I tried to point out some other things to them, but they cut me off short. I guess they thought I was just trying to protect my sister and her guilty lover, which is a laugh. The whole police theory in this case is ridiculous. Come on, I’ll prove it to you—”
Lawn leaped suddenly to her feet and drew Miss Withers out through the rear of the house, down the steps, across the patio, and down the path which led around the bathhouse. Before them lay the big concrete-lined hole in the ground which had once been the swimming pool, with only a few puddles of murky water at the bottom.
“It was here that they found him,” Lawn said, pointing towards a corner of the pool at the deep end, the widest part of the oval. Peering down, Miss Withers could see the exit of the drainpipe, and by squinting a little she fancied that she could make out the jagged bit of metal which had caught and held the body of Huntley Cairns.
“Dear, dear!” she said.
“Now, look, Miss Withers,” Lawn said abruptly. “Do you know how long a garden rake is?”
“When I was a girl,” the schoolteacher said, “there used to be a riddle about how long is a piece of string, but I forget the answer.”
“This is no riddle. Because garden rakes are all approximately the same length. Wait a minute.” The girl disappeared around the corner of the building and in a mo
ment was back with an ordinary rake. She held it erect on the tiles so that the teeth came almost but not quite to her forehead. “You see? They don’t make rakes any longer than this. The one the police took away as Exhibit A was just like this. And yet Pat is supposed to have murdered Huntley by holding him under with a rake, like this.”
Lawn took the tool to the edge of the swimming pool, reached down with it as far as she could. “You see? The pool was just ten feet deep here, and the rake handle is barely five. If you allow a couple of feet for the width of the body, then the murderer must still have reached down a good three feet into the water in order to hook Huntley’s shorts on to that projecting bit of metal.”
The schoolteacher inclined her head gravely. “Your mathematics seem correct,” she admitted.
“Well, then! Pat’s sleeves were only wet a little at the wrist when I let him out of that dressing room Saturday night. Jed Nicolet can testify to the same thing because he saw Pat in the bar only a little while later.”
“And how about Searles’s sleeves?”
“I didn’t see him. But it wouldn’t matter, even if he was dripping to the shoulder, because he did most of the work hauling the body out, remember. He must have had to reach down as far as he could to hook the rake—” She stopped, biting her lip. “What a grisly business this is!”
Miss Withers was inclined to agree with her. They headed back for the house by way of the toolshed so Lawn could replace the rake. The flagged path led them almost to the kitchen door, and then the schoolteacher stopped short, pointing a lean finger. “What’s that?”
Lawn hesitated. “It looks like Helen’s white bathing suit. I guess Beulah hung it out.”
“A little odd, isn’t it? I mean, the pool has been dry since yesterday morning, so she can’t have been swimming.” The schoolteacher looked at the brief lastex garment, made so form-fitting that it had to be laced like a football at either side, and noticed that the laces had been tied tight and then torn instead of being untied.
“Helen never takes any care of her things,” Lawn informed her. “I used to have to mend them for her, and now Beulah has to do it.”
Miss Withers Regrets Page 9
